A ghost ride through Finnish TV archives of the 1960s grazes the moon landing, American TV shows, a war in Africa. But how to connect with the world when dancing is forbidden?!
The anonymous narrator is a kind of web-adventurous flâneuse, neurotic and endlessly curious. A disturbance in the proprioception, which is the ability to sense the position, movement and location of the body and its parts, makes her perceive the world in a new way. Seemingly random anecdotes found on the internet and instructions from her cryptic physiotherapist start to come together in surprising ways. The found material forms a mosaic that reflects a world full of gazes, rules and technologies that separate us. Lines from the present and the distant past take our narrator to the 1960s, where medieval dance bans, televised wars, lost bones, space utopias and American TV stars collide. This film reflects how we can be and live in the world within ourselves and with each other. With those who are near and with those who are far. Along with all this, the film recommends dancing to everyone.
Celestial Queer: The Life, Work and Wonder of James MacSwain
Celestial Queer: The Life, Work and Wonder of James MacSwain
Sue Johnson, Eryn Foster
DOK Film Market Exclusives
Documentary Film
Canada
2023
72 minutes
English
International Premiere open
Synopsis
Celestial Queer is a 72-minute feature documentary celebrating James MacSwain, a beloved queer artist, animator and gay rights activist. Born and raised in the “backwater” of Atlantic Canada, MacSwain has been making ground-breaking experimental films, animations and provocative art performances for more than half a century.
Through a combination of playful verité and rarely-seen footage from his archive, Celestial Queer accompanies MacSwain and a revolving cast of characters as he revisits everything from the sites of some of his most recognised works to the rocky tidal shores of Nova Scotia. The film also includes rarely-seen footage from the famous 1984 rooftop “Phallus Performance” during which MacSwain was almost arrested and charged with obscenity. New work has been made specifically in conjunction with the film, while also including restorations of over a dozen of MacSwain's 16mm films.
Jim's effusive character, prolific work, and community organising have inspired generations of artists to be fearlessly themselves. Celestial Queer now introduces audiences to one of Canada's best-kept secrets – an artist who is effortlessly charming, engagingly prolific, and subversive to his surrealist core.
22 years after they established the women's organisation Machsom Watch, its founders reveal what really happened at the checkpoints between Israel and the West Bank.
22 years after they established the women's organisation Machsom Watch, its founders reveal what really happened at the checkpoints between Israel and the West Bank between 2002 and 2012. This is the story of a group of courageous women who dedicated their lives to safeguarding human rights and peace.
The film is built on 9 short stories of the women who participate in the film. Each one of them is adding a personal view of the daily routine of the checkpoint that together crate a very powerful and moving document.
Together, Zoe and her little brother manage to leave their fantasy worlds behind and stick a healing plaster on the wound left by the loss of their mother.
In a run-down neighbourhood, Zoe and her little brother Theo are left to fend for themselves. A young adolescent, Zoe is a ball of anger haunted by an intimate terror. Theo, still a child, flees reality into a fantastical world. During a scorching summer day, the two children will have to burst the abscess of their relationship so as not to lose each other.
In Burkina Faso, in the gold-digging site of Bantara, 16-year-old Rasmané descends more than 100 meters deep in artisanal mines to extract gold. Anxious about accidents, Rasmané makes his way in this world of fierce adults in the hope of one day becoming emancipated…
In a melancholy dialogue with her boyfriend and people she met by chance, the director tries to fathom the secret of love. A wistful and poetical journey to the Caspian Sea.
A filmmaker is searching for a place where she and her boyfriend first went on a date. On this little trip, she meets random people and asks them about love, memories, and the meaning of life. Meanwhile, the pollution of the Caspian Sea pulls her search for answers towards her inner questions about memories, feelings, and happiness.
The son of Brooklyn's most admired Rabbi reveals the truth about the extreme and isolated cult his father established and the atrocities in it, that continue to this day.
A Hasidic True Crime Story. An astounding 300,000 people attended the funeral of Rabbi Schik – an admired American ultra-Orthodox Rabbi. Unbeknownst to his followers, Rabbi Schik was also the leader of a transatlantic crime organisation which established an extreme and segregated cult spanning between Brooklyn and Israel. While female members were forced into underage marriages and sustained sexual assaults, the money was flowing into the Rabbi's own pockets. This corrupt culture prevailed for decades, with no one ever daring to expose the painful truth – until now.
Over the course of seven years, the story follows the Rabbi's son and two women who ultimately left the cult. Together, they discover and expose the devastating legacy of the Rabbi and his community.
Two best friends are drifting through the city of Montreal. They come from a small Inuit settlement in northern Canada and share the same heritage, language and longings.
Kathy and Teresa are best friends. Far from their home village, a small Inuit settlement in northern Canada, the two young women share a tender relationship in the city of Montreal.
14-year-old Kiki is sentenced to juvenile prison for violence and drug offences. His sister convinces the authorities to give him one last chance: a therapeutic trip to the desert.
After being kicked out of every available youth-at-risk framework, and after facing criminal charges for drug trafficking and violence, Kiki is about to enter a youth prison by court order. Gal, his sister, manages to convince the authorities to give Kiki one last chance. Gal is a caregiver for youth-at-risk in a framework that takes youth on experiential, therapeutic field trips through the desert. Gal and her co-workers take Kiki on a field trip to the desert. She is determined to succeed where everyone else has failed. Will the journey enable Kiki to grow and to take responsibility for his own fate?
Can intimacy exhaustion in a monogamous marriage be avoided? Love is no longer present in my parents' relationship, which echoes my own marriage. Is there a way to keep the spark?
Monogamia takes you on a roller-coaster journey into the world of love and intimacy within committed relationships. Follow the director's personal quest to bring back the love that once flourished between his parents. As you watch, the inevitable question arises: can love indeed endure the test of time? Can the revelation of buried secrets revive the spark of long-lost intimacy? Does monogamy stop being monogamy after tasting the “forbidden fruit”? Amidst this captivating exploration, consider the excitement and price of open relationships.
106 timepieces disappeared from Jerusalem's Museum of Islamic Art in the biggest art heist in Israel's history. 40 years later, the enigmatic thief's widow tells their story.
It all started with a watch, or more precisely, with over 106 rare European timepieces. One piece alone, made especially for the ill-fated French queen Marie Antoinette, was valued at a whopping $30 million. On a quiet Friday evening in 1983, the collection disappeared from Jerusalem's Museum of Islamic Art. It wasn't seen again for a quarter of a century. The biggest art theft in Israel's history left the police scratching their heads. When the timepieces gradually resurfaced a quarter of a century later, the enigmatic thief was dead. His widow, Nili Shamrat from LA, tells director Nili Tal their story for the first time among policemen, lawyers and curators.
In an attempt to understand the stamp of genius and logical madness of her stepfather, Michal goes on a journey with personal videos that explore America's most notorious criminals.
Michal opens a cardboard box, containing a rare private video tape archive of her conversations with some of the most psychopathic criminals in America – Charles Manson, Richard Ramirez, and others. What motivated her to enter this dark world?
We would find out that she is only trying to understand the abuse she herself suffered.
In an unusual and courageous way, Michal tries to get answers to questions she did not dare ask her father, Motke Kedar, a genius and a psychopath in his own right, who was involved in one of the most infamous scandals of the Israeli Mossad.
The director, a stateless Filipino, returns to his native country. For more than twenty years, he lived without papers in the USA and feels trapped in a world full of borders.
A poetic essay film through the lens of an undocumented immigrant becoming disillusioned by their future in the United States and deciding to return to an estranged homeland. Nowhere Near tracks down the origin of a family curse backtracking through the post 9/11 era, the US occupation of the Philippines and the spiritual conquest of the Spanish empire. The film is a years-long diary towards understanding the causes of migration to the United States, though ultimately this odyssey deviates far from the expected course.
Diabetes: Matthew Lancit lives in constant fear of the complications of his disease, so he simply anticipates the body horror himself. The result is equally funny and disturbing.
What started as a nostalgic film diary about his diabetes has been gradually contaminated by Matthew's anticipation of possible futures. Introducing monstrous elements into his family home movies, he re-appropriates tropes from the body horror films of his youth to create an image of the invisible disease.
In 2010, a man was found dead in one of Israel's maximum security prisons. When the story broke, the suicide of this anonymous Mossad agent revealed the agency's failures.
On December 15, 2010, a prisoner was found dead in his cell at one of Israel's maximum security prisons. The prisoner had hung himself despite being under heavy surveillance 24/7. None of the prison's guards knew his real name or his crime. They knew him only as Prisoner X.
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